Be the first to know about breaking news, articles, and updates.
The Coast | News, events, restaurants, concerts and Burger Week for Halifax, Nova Scotia
Home of the Best of Halifax Reader's Choice Awards, the award-winning independent newspaper covers the Halifax news, politics, events, concerts, movies, restaurants, and nightlife scene.
after considerable time working on my thesis and just few weeks before submitting it, my supervisor said: “I am not sure the work is enough for the degree”.
Don’t you think that you should have said something before? maybe when I submitted the earlier drafts?
—sick of it all
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2009.
7 Comments
Would you like some cheese with that whine?
Master’s or PhD?
Either way, grad student’s are cheap labour (especially in science) so your supervisor is probably just trying to keep you around for an extra year or two. Otherwise, yeah, you never should have been allowed to start writing up without the approval of your advisor and committee. If you have published you can tell your boss to suck it ‘cuz you’re writing up anyway.
Anyone contemplating grad school should read “The PhD Trap” by Wilfred Cude.
Certainly opened my eyes.
Sorry to hear this OP. I quit my Masters because my “fantastic work” and “great thesis ideas” were slowly morphed until I was doing my professor’s research. When I realized that where I started and where the year had ended were at very different – and unrecognizable ends – I quit.
Three, I don’t know anyone who’d have the balls to do that, you rock. 🙂
Were you doing science Three? I mean if so, what do you mean by you were doing your professor’s research? Were you upset that you weren’t getting credit for your ideas or that you were no longer doing the work you wanted to be doing?
Miles – I was doing History and was upset that I was not doing the work that got me accepted. I’d spent considerable effort researching and writing about an area that had been little explored. There was room to grow this into a PhD and to integrate/contextualize the work into the larger body of knowledge surrounding this time period – giving a component of society a historical voice while not becoming too entrenched in my own niche.
Conversations with my prof were futile. Pointing out that the change in direction resembled his work and not mine did nothing to further my point, and I was told (basically) that I had to do what i was being told or my thesis would be rejected.
Thanks Dino, but I don’t rock. It was less about balls and more about realizing that I was not happy with what I was doing. Becoming entrenched in an area that I did not enjoy would have made for an unhappy career.